Costilla County, Colorado · near Fort Garland · APN 701-06-180: The Fire Took the Shade. It Left You the Sun.

Nobody Up Here Sends You a Bill for the View

There's a particular kind of tired that comes from paying every month for a place you can't change. Somebody else sets the rules, the power company sets the rate, and none of it ever turns into yours. This piece of Colorado high country runs the other direction: 2.1 acres at 9,048 feet in the Sangre de Cristos, in a pocket the 2018 Spring Fire came through and the mountain has been taking back ever since.

Picture the panels going up right where the timber used to stand in their way, and a wood stove doing the whole job come January. You drop the standing dead on your own schedule and stack it, which is about the only free firewood anybody ever gets handed. Nothing runs on a meter, and nothing has to be finished by spring.

It's thirty minutes down to Fort Garland, and roughly an hour west to Alamosa when the grocery list gets serious. An hour south of the gate is San Luis, lived in since 1851, which makes it the oldest town in Colorado (Colorado itself didn't show up for another twenty-five years).

I'm not going to dance around it: this ground went through a fire. What that costs you is shade, and what it hands you is full sun and sightlines clear across the valley to the high peaks, worth a good deal more at this elevation than timber is when your power has to come off a roof (the young aspen coming up gold through the grass every fall is a bonus nobody bills you for).

Up here the weather sets the schedule and the aspen keeps its own counsel. Both of them will still be at it long after you've decided where the porch goes.